The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth Updated: Entirely Bizarre

It seems to be one of those obscure sports that some people indulge in, you know, like extreme ironing or spelunking. I refer of course to the constant updating of the Club of Rome's report on Limits to Growth. It seems like every year or two someone comes out with yet another mash up of current data and the old report to tell us all once again that aieeeee! we're all gonna' die!

The constant updating is necessary of course because according to the last update we should all already be dead, the oceans empty, the atmosphere befouled and biodiversity just a distant memory. Plus no fuel or minerals to do anything about it with. So I can't say I was surprised to see yet another update:

A renowned Australian research scientist says a study from researchers at MIT claiming the world could suffer from a "global economic collapse" and "precipitous population decline" if people continue to consume the world's resources at the current pace is still on track, nearly 40 years after it was first produced.

The Smithsonian Magazine writes that Australian physicist Graham Turner says "the world is on track for disaster" and that current research from Turner coincides with a famous, and in some quarters, infamous, academic report from 1972 entitled, "The Limits to Growth." Turner's research is not affiliated with MIT or The Club for Rome.

I'm not sure if I've the latest version of Turner's report but a version can be seen here. And in that version there's something very strange indeed.

Now in there he says something I agree with and therefore of course he is correct. This is this blog's definition of being correct: agreeing with me. That is that while we do indeed face hard limits to the availability of metals and or minerals these hard limits are so far away that they're not in fact either something we should worry about as yet nor are they real constraints on our actions as yet.

So, good, that's something we don't have to worry about then. However, then he goes on to make a further assumption:

To account for substitutability between resources a simple and robust position has been taken. First, it is assumed here that metals and minerals will not substitute for bulk energy resources such as fossil fuels.

Well, that's a very odd assumption indeed. To start with it is a breach of the economists' standard assumption that everything is substitutable. Absolutely everything is, no exceptions. We might not like the substitutes, might positively hate them in fact, but they do exist.

The second thing is that of course here he's just entirely killed the whole alternative and renewables energy movement. For that's what all of them are, substituting metals and minerals for fossil fuels. Nuclear power is substituting fissionable (or if fusion ever works, fusion-able) elements for fossil fuels, dams and hydro power are substituting cement for fossil fuels, solar cells are substituting silicon, gallium, germanium, indium, cadmium and tellurium for fossil fuels and windmills aluminium.

So if we're not running out of metals and minerals but we are substituting metals and minerals for fossil fuels then the idea that actually, the Club of Rome were quite right looks a bit odd, doesn't it? In fact, that one assumption obviates everything else that Turner wants to tell us. For he's just assumed the exact opposite of what we're all already doing.

Ho hum. Guess we'll have to wait for the next such report to come along to tell us all we're about to die, eh?